Hello,
Had to push my luck and upgrade my Kossel with Diamond hotend. So far I have managed to print something with the default one extruder Marlin firmware. Even after slowing down the print speed the print quality is not very promising. When printing very slow simple rectangular objects the output is average at best. It however seems that there are some problems with extrusion as the filament extrusion is very inconsistent (see the picture). Mechanically it seems to do what it should: the lines are straight, calibration seems to hold and the first layer comes out evenly. There are no clogs or jams nor leaking anywhere. When pushing filament manually it seems come out pretty consistent. There were no problems with the standard E3D V6 hotend. However, as I now have three similar extruder steppers (5/11 planetary Nema17s) I though that maybe it's better to test it with another stepper. Also I thought that at the same time it would be ok to upgrade the firmware to support diamond hotend's three extruders.
Currently I have connected the stepper expander (http://reprap.org/wiki/Adding_more_extruders#RAMPS_using_Stepper_Expander) to my Mega+RAMPS 1.4 combo and the green led glows telling that it's working ok (see the picture)? I hear a small noise when plugging the extruder stepper which makes me believe that everything should be ok... I tried to add more steppers to Marlin, but somehow I couldn't get it work so I decided to switch to Repetier firmware as it seems to have overall better support for diamond hotend. After using the Repetier firmware web wizard using the Marlin settings as a model the printer boots fine with the new Repetier fw. Made the following changes to firmware:
- Configuration.h: NUM_EXTRUDER 3
- Configuration.h: MOTHERBOARD 33
- pins.h (under ifdef RAMPS_V_1_3: #define ORIG_E2_STEP_PIN 64
- pins.h (under ifdef RAMPS_V_1_3: #define ORIG_E2_DIR_PIN 59
- pins.h (under ifdef RAMPS_V_1_3: #define ORIG_E2_ENABLE_PIN 44
- pins.h (under ifdef RAMPS_V_1_3): #define E2_PINS ORIG_E2_STEP_PIN,ORIG_E2_DIR_PIN,ORIG_E2_ENABLE_PIN,
Result: I can only command two of the steppers with Simplify3D and RepetierHost. The third stepper connected to stepper expander don't do anything. I have crossplugged the stepper motors and they all work.
I'm running out of ideas, would be very glad if someone could help with this.
